Reborn as a Succubus: Time To Live My Best Life!-Chapter 414: Discovery

Melisa didn’t go to the bar that night.

Instead, she sat cross-legged in her room at the cottage, eyes closed, essence detection stretched as far as she could push it. The village hummed around her, hundreds of signatures pulsing in the dark. Kitsune sleeping, kitsune drinking, kitsune fucking. The usual.

She was looking for something else.

[Come on... I should be able to feel it happening. Right? A sudden drop in someone’s essence... Something.]

Hours passed. Nothing unusual. Melisa’s head started to ache from the sustained concentration, but she kept at it.

Around midnight, she finally gave up and went to sleep.

The next day was more of the same.

Melisa skipped training with Tessa, claiming she wasn’t feeling well. Instead, she wandered the village, watching, sensing, cataloguing. She found three more sick kitsune and asked each of them the same questions.

When did you start feeling ill?

Did anything unusual happen around that time?

Did you sleep with anyone new?

Two of them mentioned Sylra.

The third couldn’t remember clearly, her thoughts too foggy from the illness, but she was a regular at The Laughing Fox. She went there almost every night.

The knot in Melisa’s stomach kept tightening.

She spent the afternoon meditating in the cottage, practicing her essence detection until her skull throbbed. She was getting better at reading fine details now. The subtle fluctuations in someone’s energy when they lied. The way essence dimmed when a person was tired or sick. The way it flared when they were aroused or angry.

[If something’s draining these kitsune, I need to catch it in the act. I need to see it happen.]

Night fell.

Melisa sat in darkness, her awareness spread across the village like a net.

Hours crawled by. The signatures around her shifted and moved as people went about their lives. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing that screamed "here’s your answer, idiot."

She was starting to drift off when she felt it.

A pull.

Not in the village. Somewhere beyond it, in the woods to the north. A concentration of essence so dense it made her teeth ache. Like someone had gathered up all the ambient energy in the area and compressed it into a single point.

[What the hell is that?]

Melisa’s eyes snapped open. She scrambled out of bed and rushed to Zephyra’s room, shaking her shoulder.

"Zephyra. Wake up."

Nothing. The Court Sorceress was out cold, her breathing deep and even. Melisa shook harder.

"Zephyra!"

Still nothing. Not even a twitch.

[She’s a light sleeper. She should have woken up by now. Unless...]

Melisa checked Zephyra’s essence. It was normal, healthy, no signs of tampering.

[Fuck it. I don’t have time for this.]

She grabbed her shoes and headed for the door.

---

The woods were dark.

Melisa moved through the trees, following that pull of concentrated essence like a compass needle pointing north. Branches snagged at her clothes and roots tried to trip her, but she kept going. The sensation grew stronger with every step, a pressure building behind her eyes.

[This is stupid. I should have waited for Zephyra. I should have gotten help.]

But she couldn’t shake the feeling that if she waited, she’d miss something important.

The trees opened into a small clearing.

Melisa stopped at the edge, hidden in the shadows.

Two figures stood in the moonlight. One was a kitsune, young, maybe late teens, with pale blue hair. She was on her knees, her expression slack and dreamy, like she was having a really good dream.

The other figure had silver hair and a black tail.

Sylra.

She stood over the kitsune, one hand resting on the woman’s cheek. Even from here, Melisa could see what was happening. Essence flowed from the kitsune into Sylra in a steady stream, visible to Melisa’s trained senses as ribbons of light being drawn out and absorbed.

The kitsune’s signature was dimming. Rapidly. What had been a healthy glow was fading to a flicker, then barely an ember.

[No. No no no no no.]

Melisa must have made a sound. Or maybe Sylra had known she was there all along.

Either way, Sylra looked up.

Their eyes met across the clearing.

And Sylra smiled.

Not a guilty smile. Not a caught-in-the-act smile. A wide, delighted grin, like she was genuinely happy to see Melisa standing there.

"Oh good," Sylra said. "You figured it out."

The kitsune collapsed.

Melisa’s eyes bounced between the kitsune on the floor and the nim standing beside her.

[What the hell am I looking at?]

Sylra’s red eyes glittered in the moonlight. Her smile didn’t waver.

"We should talk," she said.

---

{Zephyra}

(A little earlier)

The door clicked shut.

Zephyra opened her eyes.

She lay still for a moment, listening to Melisa’s footsteps fade down the hall, then out the front door. Only when silence settled over the cottage did she sit up, pushing the blankets aside.

The window overlooked the village and the woods beyond. Zephyra crossed the room and rested her elbows on the frame, gazing out into the darkness. Somewhere out there, Melisa was walking toward something she’d been circling for days now.

[Took her long enough to notice.]

Zephyra had felt the pull too, of course. Anyone with decent magical senses would have picked up on it eventually. The question was never whether Melisa would find the source.

The question was what she’d do when she did.

[She’s sentimental. Trusting. She wants to see the best in people, even when the evidence says otherwise.]

But she was also clever. And stubborn. And surprisingly ruthless when the situation called for it.

Zephyra had seen the reports from Yalmir. From the plague crisis. From the Shadow Mage purges. Melisa Blackflame wasn’t just a talented mage with a good heart. She was someone who made hard choices and lived with the consequences.

[So. Which way will you go, little nim?]

The trees swayed in a breeze Zephyra couldn’t feel from inside. Somewhere beyond them, a confrontation was happening. Or about to happen. Or already over.

Not her problem. Not yet, anyway.

Zephyra pushed off from the window and returned to bed. The sheets were still warm.

[She’ll either handle it or she won’t. Either way, I’ll find out in the morning.]

She closed her eyes.

This time, she actually went to sleep.